University of Oxford
The Art of the Hebrew Book in Medieval Brabant
Celeste Jingyan Pan is a PhD candidate in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, where she has been working under the supervision of Professor Judith Olszowy-Schlanger. Her primary interest is in scribal and visual culture in medieval Ashkenaz (c1250-1350). Her doctoral thesis, submitted in April 2026, deals with several related manuscripts, made in the duchy of Brabant during the early-fourteenth century, which contain decorations executed by their Jewish scribes. More generally, she is interested in manuscripts copied by displaced scribes (especially after the English and French expulsions), and the phenomenon of medieval Ashkenazic Jewish scribes doubling as artists, which has received little scholarly attention so far.